Initial Ideas

Idea / Concept

The whole concept I came up with was to have these four people who are different colours depending on their emotions. The colours and emotions that I chose are as follows, green = disgust, red = anger, blue = sadness and, yellow = happiness. I then thought to have on the left side of the page what the different emotions means and why you might feel them. For the right hand side of the page I wanted to have some form of activity for the children to want to do and also enjoy doing. It would be related to the ‘Emotion Team’ which I have called the four emotion people. I called the people the ‘Emotion Team’ because I thought it would be more appealing and engaging for the children.

Colour / Texture

The colours used within the pages are clear and bold, so they can be easily seen and read. The one area where this might be a struggle is the yellow text for what happiness means, so this aspect might have to be changed. So far the colour palette is:

Red: R=208 G=45 B=40, C=12.2 M=96.34 Y=98.25 K=2.72

Blue: R=30 G=78 B=161, C=96 M=79 Y=2 K=0

Green: R=37 G= 128 B=49, C=84 M=26 Y=100 K=12

Yellow: R=243 G=225 B=31, C=7 M=4 Y=97 K=0

As for the background of the page, I wanted to use a light gradient which didn’t conflict with the four bold colours, so I thought a light blue to white might work, and it has fairly well to the other colours in bold to stand out. Over the top of the gradient I have added a pattern to give it some form of texture. the reason why I have decided to do this is because I saw in the Okido books that the background isn’t always just a solid colour, sometimes there will be a textured look background. So I thought to do this as it would also give the page a better look that just having a gradient and solid bold colours covering the page.

Typography

As for the typography, the title was a feature that I wanted to make stand out clearly, so i thought to have four paint strokes of the four colours used for the emotions chosen. Then overlap them and put text over the top and cut off a border that would show the background. This effect is simple and easy to do, not only this is still keeps the text clear for the children and parents to read. I mainly added bevels (to add a small 3D element) and strokes (outlines) to the work which can be adjust according to fit the page. The designs are definitely not final as improvements can be made to make the page better.

Media

For these initial designs I wanted to use the digital images that I had created for the characters because a lot of children’s magazine use digital images. From this I wanted to try and incorporate them into my initial ideas as they would match my design as a whole because it was created on the computer.

The first image is the template I had designed so different activities could be created on the other page.

The two following images are from creating them at home from GIMP (free software like Photoshop). But afterwards I decided to remake them in college with Photoshop so they look better and could do the effects better. In addition to this the quality of the images from home were low, so this was another reason for redoing them.